hee hee

A friend Miriam sent this through today.

http://lifeinpublishing.tumblr.com/


http://lifeinpublishing.tumblr.com/post/34647435566/at-least-one-book-im-working-on-in-any-given-week

A pin board of some broken dreams

I've been pinning some of my favourite book designs on my Pinterest board of inspirational stuff

http://pinterest.com/sandycull/inspirational-stuff/

and many come from Darren Haggar.

http://www.dhaggar.com/

What I love about his website – apart from it's stunning simplicity – is that, as well as covers that get approved and finally printed, he also puts concepts that don't survive the approval process. An excellent idea which I might have to utterly copy.

I wonder if you can tell which little beauties here were cut off at the knees.

TATA –The Age of The Acronym

Book designers have always been fundamentally concerned with the readers experience – from that initial seeing the book cover in the shop, the rolling it around in the hands, the touching the stock and the taking in of the image; to the reading of the blurb and perhaps a sly breathing-in of the binding. When we take it home, we crack it's spine a tad and sit for several nights with it's flawless typography, enjoying the care and attention to detail and run our hands across of the pages.

I guess this is now called the UX, the User Experience?

And here's the UK Penguin Essentials – (Essential reading, beautifully designed).

In this new digital age, never has the design of a book been more important.
http://www.penguin.co.uk/static/cs/uk/0/minisites/penguinessentials/#

My favourite is the cover of Diary of a Nobody, illustrated by Rob Lowe of Supermundane:

Stefan, Liz and my new friend Ted

My friend Prue sent me a link to Elizabeth Gilbert's TED talk about the creative process. Yes, yes. Still bleating on about this. EG talks about trying to write a new book after the success of 'Eat, Pray, Love'. I'm probably the only person on the planet who hasn't read it . . . nor seen the film.

This excellent talk reminded me of when a colleague jokingly told me years ago - well, I think he was joking - that 'The Cook's Companion' (1995), would be my brightest book design triumph and that every book I designed thereafter would ultimately fall short. Be that as it may, :(, I like EGs idea of having an external force on hand sometimes. I'm almost inspired to get a copy of EPL.

Now these TED talks are a whole other distraction for me. What am I doing watching these at 11pm when I could be sleeping? Elizabeth Gilbert, Phillipe Starck and then several by Stefan Sagmeister. Great stuff. . . enjoy. Thanks Prue.

http://www.ted.com/

http://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius.html

http://www.ted.com/talks/stefan_sagmeister_the_power_of_time_off.html

Essential reading

The amazing Craig Mod. I've had this is my reading pile since Liam sent the link two weeks ago. Thank you Liam. Go make yourself a cuppa and double click.

http://craigmod.com/journal/hack_the_cover/

Scribbles from 2012 agIdeas

Last week I had the pleasure of listening to book designer Jenny Grigg at the recent AGideas forum in Melbourne. Lordy, what an excellent presentation. Jenny showcased her work on the Peter Carey wood-type and subsequent paper-cut series. A fantastic approach to the talk was that Jenny re-enacted her exact paper cutting process in a series of short films. These beautifully illustrated not only, the care and patience and attention to detail that was originally taken, but more strikingly, the pure creative brilliance of these final pieces. Yay Jenny.


 






















And some scribbles from my notebook after 3 immersive days:

• Collaborate.
• Ideas – start stealing them.
• Cradle to cradle design – The creative collaborative power of designers can leave the planet better than how we found it.
• Quadruple bottom line design thinking – financial, environmental, social and cultural.
• Have conviction in your ideas, commit.
• Have fun.
• 3Ps Preparation, Possibility and Patience.
• Good ideas are scary, risky, expensive, outrageous, difficult and silly.
• When you can do virtually anything you don’t want to do it anymore.
• Teach.
• Inspire don't motivate.
• Listen to the end user, don’t believe them.
• We design experiences.
• When the storm comes, some people build walls, others build windmills.
• Play, share, explore.
• Fill yourself up with stuff and trust your brain to sort it out.
• What’s important is not what you control but what you can’t; room for chance.
• Explore – Comfort becomes laziness becomes mediocrity.
• With courage comes freedom.
• And from Book Artist and maker, Peter Lysiotis whose presentation I still remember from a few forums ago: making books is an antedate to our throwaway culture, pray for spillage, find something you love and let it kill you.